STAR FALL PEOPLE Chapter 1

Sley: Orenburg Oblast, Russia

PART ONE

THE HIDDEN

“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.”

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

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The blackout struck while Sley was crossing the yard. The wedge of Siberian sky was suddenly visible, pristine in the sub-zero night and unusually clear of smog. Through a canopy of barbed wire, he saw stars. For the first time in ten years.

Around him the other prisoners reacted with silence, stillness: not even a whiff or rustle of movement, not a single exhale. But their hesitation was fearful, remembering the last time the lights went out. Not this again!

Sley’s thoughts were elsewhere. His memories were a heap of slush but gazing up he saw in the randomness of the sharp-edged stars the precise pattern of Helen Becker’s face.

The guards broke the paralysis first, shouting Don’t Move, but the panic in their calls was obvious. The shock of stillness, and then: The prisoners scattered into wild zigzags, their huffs filling the darkness.

Sley didn’t move. The Invisible Thief didn’t try to run. He looked up, exposing his throat to the cold.

Someone in the yard cried out in Russian, “It’s another Darkout!”

Guards, not ready to relive that week of terror—a week when the prisoners had run amok, when tribes meant nothing, when the prison became an arena of sadism—began to shoot into the blackened yard. They didn’t care who they hit so long as it was a human.

Above the brightening mouths of the guards’ rifle barrels, the stars burst too.

Sley remained rooted to his spot, feeling bullets whistle past his face, transfixed by the heavens. An incandescent streak ran down the nighttime sky, like a tear. Then another.

Stars fall, moon eclipses sun.

The last time Sley had witnessed such a meteor shower it had changed his life. Ended it or started it, he still hadn’t worked out. But he had come to agree with the medieval soothsayers when it came to celestial omens. They were a curse.

Something small and hot punched him in the side. He stumbled and surrendered a grunt.

The electricity crackled and the floodlights smothered the courtyard. The blackout had been too brief for the prisoners to do more than disperse aimlessly. Two of them lay dead, another sat clutching his bleeding arm. Guards rushed into the yard brandishing nightsticks and set about beating everyone until they were satisfied they had erased any thought of rebellion.

Sley welcomed taking a few hits. They’d be a useful cover. When the guards backed off, he got to his feet, his arms and back groaning from the blows, but nothing like the iron poker that seemed to torment his waist. He placed his hand there and felt hot wetness.

A quartet of guards dragged the two corpses to a far corner. Sley had another moment of panic, unable to recognize the dead men in their identical prison jackets and felt hats. Other guards corralled the prisoners into a line aimed the other direction, away from the slaughter. Sley sighted the stooped figure and let himself relax. The man called khorek, the Ferret, was alive.

The general fear of the blackout had given way to the adrenaline rush of a brush with death. Men whispered about the sheer luck of their narrow escape, ascribing meanings from the mystical to the mathematic. Some muttered revenge against the trigger-happy guards. Others wondered if another Darkout was indeed about to envelop the world, and how long it would last this time.

Sley limped in their midst as the prisoners were marched inside. The sting in his waist began to fade; the blood was clammy against his skin but the wound had closed. Sley sensed the postures of his fellow prisoners relax. Sley could see their weary eyes move to the tea kettles and the TV behind its own set of iron bars, blaring a gameshow. The men longed for the room’s warmth, its shelter from Arctic gusts, the promise of a half hour of relaxation. A few prisoners even removed their felt hats as they straddled benches lining steel tables.

The men watched the TV because it was something to watch. They wanted something to help them forget about blackouts and barrages of blind shots. If anyone mourned one of the dead, they kept it to themselves.

Television, participation in sports, work in the fabrics shop: these were privileges for these inmates who went along with the system. Cooperation was Sley’s only chance of getting out of here. The alternative was joining those who refused to be model prisoners: the vory, the thieves-in-law who considered cooperation with the guards a betrayal. The hardest of Russia’s criminal hard men. They were housed elsewhere, in the prison’s maximum-security block. They’d attack the compliant prisoners—“the degraded”—the first chance they’d get. It was their code.

Being accepted among the vory meant being a “made man” inside prison. Running with the alpha dogs. But their code demanded adherence even on the outside. It was a life without options. Sley had almost become one of them, but he had thought about the long run. Sley possessed the patience of a ghost. He did, however, be sure to remain useful to the gangsters; he still commanded favors to call in.

Besides, behind their violent expressions, Sley knew the vory were scared of him. In Orenburg Penal Colony Number Six, not even the worst killers would harm the Invisible Thief.

There were a few other people who managed to maneuver among the prison’s factions. Like the Ferret, who was too cowardly to be a made man, but whose unique skills made him valuable alive. Sley sat beside him now.

The inane gameshow was turned up loud so the prisoners could filch forbidden conversation. The Invisible Thief said to the Ferret, “My propiska.”

“Sure, Sley, sure.” The man’s little stubbly chin melted into his neck and his body was scrawny, but there was the spark of craft in his dark eyes.

Sley extended his fingers but there was no internal passport being slid into them.

“Price went up.”

Sley waited.

“Coming with you.” When this failed to elicit a response, the forger stammered, “I’m not spending another twelve years locked in with these psychos. You want your propiska, I give it to you on the outside.”

Sley drank his tea.

The program changed to the six-o’clock news. Yesterday had been Defender of the Fatherland Day. The reels showed the president laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier against the red brick of the Kremlin. The holiday had been downplayed after the Ukraine fiasco and the anti-China putsch, but a new breed of politicians had decided to dust it off, see if it would make people love them.

Next report: a group of politicians in suits and scientists in white lab coats congregated in a busy hall. An airport, probably Sheremetyevo. A woman in a tight skirt walked back and forth, waving her hand. Bulky turnstiles opened and closed around her. Then followed an image of an open passport with cartoon viruses floating past, getting lanced by great red slashes, the universal symbol for nyet.

“We have a deal, Sley?”

“How do I know you have it?”

“It’s sewn in my jacket sleeve.”

He did see what looked like a square imprint there. Sley gave the forger a nod, to buy himself some time. The Ferret had made himself an obstacle and Sley would need new insurance to safeguard his escape. There was only one man in the prison who could sell it.

Some more news stories: a sea of black and brown faces swarming the Coliseum in Rome, beating a Carabinieri to a pulp, followed by a white politician visiting a clinic of children sealed off behind layers of plastic.

His tea had grown cold. Leaf sediment stained the bottom of his steel mug. It was almost time to go back to their block. Something on the TV caught his eye.

Scientific breakthrough in Switzerland. Genetic editing, some mad brain scientists, the possibility of extending human lifespans made real.

Sley gripped the mug.

Longevity was something he knew about. He didn’t recommend it.

Cameras flashing at a news conference. A Russian voice droned over the scene of a white man in his fifties addressing a sold-out auditorium. The speaker had the tautness of an athlete, white-rimmed glasses, and silvering hair that was just unruly enough to represent a raised middle finger to the world.

Sley couldn’t believe who he was seeing: Jörg Becker. George to his Silicon Valley pals. Sley’s former business partner, and the man who had helped put Sley in this frozen hell.

Too many nights he had wallowed in fantasies of revenge, knowing they were foolish and petty, but indulging them all the same because they had made Sley feel something like human.

Besides, maybe he had deserved it.

“…can now treat sepsis without the side effects of antibody drugs,” Becker was saying between the translators’ Russian dub. “…anti-aging therapeutics.”

Of all the partings in Sley’s life, the one from Becker was relatively recent. Becker had facilitated an introduction to a research facility in Moscow, opportunity of a lifetime. Ha! Sley had shown up and government goons had arrested him.

A guard pointed the remote at the TV. Time’s up.

“Wait,” Sley said. The guard weighed how to respond. He looked at the image that had captured the attention of the Invisible Thief.

Becker was accepting a standing ovation. He reached to one side of the stage, gesturing.

A jolt pounded Sley’s heart. It’s her.

A girl joined Becker, reluctantly.

Sley’s heart stopped. Not Helen? No, not the face he had seen in the sky, the falling star streaking like her tears. Not the woman he had made love to in the fields and in the lakes, not the woman he had told himself to forget, who haunted his dreams with the melancholy of a make-believe promise.

He recognized the girl, though. She had become a woman. Short dark hair, eyes black as new moons. She still dressed like a kid—gray hoodie unzipped over a white camisole, ripped jeans and white sneakers. She was trying to shield her nerves with a look of defiance that made her look surly. Her demeanor didn’t improve when Becker put his arm around her shoulder, raising his other fist in triumph.

Sley grew aware of his own smile. He crushed it into a frown before the others might notice.

The TV winked off.

“Line up!” shouted a guard.

Sley joined the queue, and the inmates crossed the courtyard. The wind had picked up and whipped flurries in his eyes. Far above the lights of civilization, did stars still fall? What tragedy did they portend this time?

The prisoners marched to their block, home to sixty men, a wooden warehouse surrounded by barbed wire. No guards at night, just the policing of the jungle.

As a guard swung the barred door shut, Sley held out a pack of cigarettes, his last. He resisted the temptation to smoke them because they made for a useful currency. “I need to see Haidar.”

The guard responded with a shove to Sley’s chest, knocking him back, and the bars clanged shut.

His hand was empty; the guard had taken Sley’s coin.

He lay awake in the frigid darkness listening to one of the ‘degraded’ receive a beating. Piteous, futile wails. Sley ran a finger absently over the smooth skin of his hip where a bullet had passed.

Why hadn’t Helen been by George Becker’s side? And the young woman, the impossibility in what he had glimpsed in her big dark eyes…

Ten years. Ten years Sley had endured in this wasteland of desperate, sad men, being corralled from one corner to the next. He had gotten through nights like this one by thinking of Helen smiling in the golden California sunshine. He had never quite forced himself to forget that life, even knowing that he could never return, never see her again.

The combination of tonight’s events—the blackout, the falling stars, seeing Becker and his daughter, Becker’s talk of solving human aging—changed the equation. Sley had to fast-forward his plans to get an internal passport, the propiska. Which meant he would need a favor from Haidar.

Not that anyone requested something from Haidar. Groveled and begged was more like it.

Two guards approached the block. It was unusual to see them at this time of night unless a major fight broke out. Perhaps they had decided to mete out some beatings of their own, to dissuade anyone from thinking of retaliation for the killings in the yard. Or Sley’s cigarettes had bought him the meeting he craved.

“Chinky,” one said, tapping his palm with the butt of his baton.

Sley slipped on his prison jacket and followed them out, feeling the eyes of sixty men on his back. He didn’t care what they thought. The guards walked him to the cinderblock main building, pausing at the steel doors for a laser retina scan and an infrared snapshot of the veins in their palms.

The other guards didn’t bat an eye at the prisoner being marched through their compound. Sley was just a drop in the river of contraband and smuggling that flowed between Haider and the warden.

They passed through heavy doors into the maximum-security block, which was another wooden warehouse of men but with more barbed wire and armed men in towers.

The guards unlocked the door and pushed him inside.

There were only two dozen men in this block, but each of them would happily rape or maim a member of the Degraded. No one knew when a meeting with Haidar might end badly, and Sley tried to divine a threat in their surly gazes. The prisoners regarded him with indifference, but that meant nothing.

A third of the block had been curtained off. The prisoners shuffled out of the way and Sley walked to where the curtain parted.

Haidar was waiting there on a battered couch surrounded by a space heater, a TV showing a boxing match and sliding piles of magazines about fly-fishing—the Vor’s hobby on the outside, if he still remembered by now how to do it. Two henchman, one as tall as the other stout, fingered forbidden smartphones and kept watch on Sley.

Haidar pulled on a cigar. The creases in his face grew deeper each year and now he was more crag than man. He extended a fresh stogie to Sley with a hand and fingers overrun with tattoos of white crosses. “The Ferret has made something for you.”

Sley nodded and took cigar smoke into his mouth, relishing the tarry hit. The Ferret did errands for the guards too, risking the wrath of the vory, but the gangsters valued his forgery skills. Sley wasn’t surprised that the Vor knew about the transaction.

“An internal passport, Don Haidar.”

“You asked to see me. Usually men consult me in advance of their illegal activities.”

Sley bowed with contrition. “Thank you for seeing me. I want to ask for help.”

“To leave us?” Haidar laughed.

“In a way.”

“You’re fucked and you don’t even know it, Invisible Thief. The warden knows everything in that funny head of yours.”

The authorities had made their attitude toward him known for years. Had they decided to make Haidar turn on him too? He didn’t dare ask. “How much can I trust the Ferret?”

“He’s a snitch.”

Sley exhaled the smoke and tried to savor the buzz, but his mind was distracted by alarms.

Haidar added, “He’s been wearing wires.”

One henchman raised his phone. It played back a recording.

“We have a deal, Sley?”

Then Sley’s own voice: “How do I know you have it?”

 Sley asked Haidar, “Did the Ferret really get me a propiska?”

“He did. Nothing passes through here without my seeing it.”

“As you’ve proved many times, Don Haidar. So you know he wants to break out with me.”

“I thought your plan was to wait for your next plea.”

“It was.”

“What changed?”

Sley didn’t know how to answer that truthfully. “The guards got scared and killed two prisoners tonight. I can’t wait for another accident. I’m going to need your help. It would be better for the Ferret, though, if he just gave me the passport.”

“We are going to rip that traitor to pieces and string his limbs up on the barbed wire.”

“Kill him in the yard, in front of everyone,” Sley said, pulling open his jacket. “And then stab me. Your men will need to shiv me in the kidneys and the liver.” He showed them where. “I’d appreciate it if they left the lungs alone. And no heart.”

Haidar laughed and the two henchmen laughed with him.

“Invisible Thief, only you are crazy enough to get a passport so you can die.”

Sley laughed too. “It’s frozen out there, so make sure my body gets nice and frigid before the guards take us to the morgue. I’d also request that you not dismember the Ferret.”

Haidar leaned in. “Seriously, my brother, look at this face. It is the face of a man. See.” He pulled his shirt off to show his web of tattoos. He pointed to one shoulder with a church and three cupolas. “This is how many times I’ve been inside, and I’ve known you most of this last time. Suddenly you decide you want to die.”

“I said I want to leave.”

“And yet I look at you and I don’t see ten years here. I see a Chinese with skin still smooth, hair still black. No one enters the penal colony and preserves their youth.” His eyes looked down. “Were you hurt in the shooting?”

Sley regarded his uniform jacket and the dark stain on the lower edge where he had bled earlier. “No, Don Haidar. One of the men was shot next to me. It’s his blood.”

The Vor emitted a thick puff of cigar smoke, obscuring his eyes. Sley couldn’t tell if he bought the lie.

Sley said, “I’ve been of service to you, Don Haidar. Are you going to do this thing for me?”

Haidar chuckled, glancing at his henchmen to make sure they didn’t think Sley was challenging him.

“I’m asking,” Sley added, realizing his mistake.

Too late. One of the thugs whacked him on the head and toppled him over. Haidar bent forward and screwed his cigar’s tip into the top of Sley’s hand.

Sley whimpered as he pulled his hand back, the top of his skin sizzling.

“So am I,” Haidar said.

Sley got to his knees and blew the embers off his screaming skin.

“Invisible Thief,” Haidar said, “I swore an oath after you saved my life. If this is what you now want in return, a shiv in the gut, well, wish granted. But you must tell me what magic makes you like this.”

“I’m just a man,” Sley murmured.

“You are the Invisible Thief,” Haidar shouted. “You think I forget what you are?”

Sley shook his head.

He had saved the Vor’s life during the Darkout: four or five days of zero electricity, zero power, zero light. He wasn’t even sure how long it had lasted. The entire prison had become a Battle Royale, a slaughterhouse. No one noticed how many times Sley took a crippling blow, but he had used the time to forge alliances and earn trust. Haidar had decided the quiet Chinese man with the flying fists that had saved the Vor from a pack of vengeful guards could join his ranks.

Sley had agreed to swear their oath and let them tattoo him.

The next day the lights came back on.

Haidar had decreed Sley, the foreigner, be marked by sailing ships, to signify the nomadic thief who travels to steal. The Pricker got to work with his crude needles, pumping ink beneath Sley’s skin all night as the other prisoners watched. The ordeal left him in burning misery and putting on his jacket the next morning had been torture. He shuffled with the rest of the block’s prisoners to the showers, and everyone wanted to look at his markings, their curiosity tempered with deference. Sley was now vory, a made man.

He had grimaced as he backed under the powerful spray, but there was no need. The pain by now had ebbed to a dull ache. The sideways glances of the other prisoners changed again, to astonishment. Sley didn’t understand why until he looked at the water pooling about his feet and sloshing into the drain, black with ink.

The ships were gone, traceless over an invisible horizon.

His back was as pale and smooth as ever.

That was a dangerous moment, surrounded by those naked men, all sadists and killers, streetwise criminals who had never seen such a thing before. Was this a trick, an insult? Sorcery?

“I’m still a thief,” Sley had shouted. “I am the thief that the cops can never see.”

That’s when the vory began calling him the Invisible Thief. They weren’t about to kill him after witnessing…what exactly? Had it been a divine intervention? A satanic one?

Sley wondered the same.

He spent the rest of his years of incarceration trying to pretend the incident had never happened, making himself useful to the vory and to the guards, never snitching, always finding a way to survive in the cracks among deadly factions.

The vory held sway inside the prison, but they found it difficult to cross the border into the normal world. As Sley got to know them, he considered it lucky that he hadn’t been incorporated as a vory; it had its uses in prison but meant a life outside still chained to their brutal code. He had thought he could ride out his six-year sentence by relying on his wits.

The guards accused him during his fifth winter of wearing another man’s gloves and the state doubled his sentence. Sley began to plan. He was fuzzy on what was going on outside, but he knew technology was making it harder for him to move around. He poured his energy and resources into securing documents. In the aftermath of the Darkout, the Russian state had reverted from digital identities, introduced in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, to old-fashioned paperwork. The internal passport took the longest to get—and now the Ferret turned out to be a government spy. The authorities were conspiring to keep him here. Forever.

Haidar, the Vor of Orenburg Penal Colony Number Six, gave Sley a hand and picked him up from the floor. Sley sucked on the cigar’s burn.

“Tell me, what is so important that you must now leave?”

“A woman,” Sley said.

Haidar laughed. “You have a woman? I don’t believe it. What’s her name, stud?”

“Helen.”

Which was true, but as Sley tried to recall her face, he saw only the girl, George’s daughter.

Haidar hadn’t expected a straightforward answer. “She must be the best piece of ass in all of China, or wherever you’re from. Did she betray you for another man and this is why you wish to die? Because I cannot think of a worse reason to—”

“Make it happen tomorrow,” Sley said. “Please.”

The next afternoon in the yard the prisoners were restricted to walking back and forth in lanes, so the guards would know where to aim if the lights failed again. It was a grim winter day; last night’s clarity had been overtaken by polluted haze above the roof of tangled wire.

The guards called Change! and the inmates rotated ninety degrees, to resume their isolated walks in a new direction that looked just like the last one. Before they had completed the turn, the Ferret screamed from behind a sudden blur of inmates. Sley jogged towards the attack. Guards blew whistles and fired warning shots, and the attackers scattered, leaving the Ferret a bloody heap.

Bodies burst past Sley and the pain was immediate and surprising: his turn to scream. His mind had no space for analysis. Only terror, and the incredible pain of being stabbed beyond count. He gagged on blood and saw only the canopy of wire, black against the indifferent Siberian day…

***

A different kind of cold. He felt a flat hardness on his back. That was just the outside. His interior was on fire. Fever in his head, in his arms, in his chest, his abdomen. He wanted to bolt upright, but he couldn’t move. Not even to pry open his eyelids.

He waited in that hellish limbo of ice and fire. Then he heard voices, male, speaking Russian. Something flashed before him. A metallic clatter. He waited for the voices to ebb and opened his eyes into the harsh cluster of lightbulbs.

Eyes shut again. More voices. He turned his head their way and dared look. Two men in aprons were bent over a table, partly blocking the white ghoulish limbs of a corpse. The Ferret.

Sley raised his head and it felt like bricks were sloshing around the back of his skull. The fever was giving way to more specific sensations, none of them happy. Most of the pain was from his lower torso.

He dared look and regretted it. The wounds would eventually seal but he would never un-see what his own knife-torn body looked like.

Time was up. He raised himself on his elbows and scanned the room. There, in a corner, was a pile of bloody prisoner outfits. Closer to hand, a tray of coroner’s tools waited to be deployed.

“Oh my God.”

“Pay attention, Yuri.”

“Oh my God!”

Sley, naked and gored, faced them with an electric autopsy saw in one hand and a scalpel in the other. The saw made a keen whine.

He worked fast and as neatly as possible, ensuring at least one of the pathologist’s uniforms remained pristine. He cut through the prisoner jackets and found the Ferret’s internal passport. It looked and felt right, Sley’s ashen photograph seamlessly incorporated into a sufficiently dog-eared document. He noted the name he’d have to use, at least until he got out of Russia.

He wondered if he’d need to do some more grotesque work on the morticians if he were to get past the prison’s biometric security. To his surprise, the doors simply opened, as if the electronics had been turned off.

It wasn’t time to second-guess his luck. Sley walked out.

The burn mark on the back of his hand, like the bullet hole above his hip, was long since gone.

(Next chapter.)